by Barry Howell: I have been a professional photographer since the early 80’s and am in the throws of embracing change like I never could have imagined. I have photographed hundreds of weddings and thousands of high school seniors. I was honored with the first ever Haga Wedding Album award for the best wedding album in Minnesota, and have entered many competition prints over the years. I began shooting weddings for a couple of studios, worked part time on my own for several years, and bought a very large studio operation in 1995. My first digital camera was a Fuji S2 and that is where my journey into the digital world really began. A good friend (and former employee) encouraged me to take a look at Lightroom and then Gavin Seim’s presets from Seim Effects.

My years of experience (and significant volume) causes me to very careful how much “post production” we commit to. Having studied with the likes of Monte Zucker, Frank Cricchio Don Blair, David Ziser and others, I learned to produce near perfect images in the camera. There just wasn’t much editing we could do with our C-41 in-house lab printing from medium format Hasselblad negatives. I am the “techie” guy that loves everything shiny, new and cool, but I didn’t jump into digital until I felt the cameras and output options rivaled film quality. My journey from film to digital has been a long and at times very frustrating path. If you are just starting out (i.e. have never shot a roll of film-I know you’re out there), appreciate my story and be glad you can develop a workflow without transitioning from anything else. Take the time to think about ways you can do it right from image capture to customer delivery.

Can you imagine doing vignettes, soft focus, precise highlight/shadow control, exposures (that if not correct, couldn’t be fixed later) all in the camera for every frame you shot? That’s what we had to do with film and I have carried this approach forward with how I capture my digital images. I am a big believer in the Photovision Exposure Target by Ed Pierce. I try to use the maximum dynamic range my camera provides to give me the best balance of exposure, contrast and detail possible. The most frustrating aspect of “post production” for me was that it seemed really difficult to develop any consistency from session to session let alone image to image. Lightroom presets will help you develop some consistency and a more efficient workflow. Any image I can edit without having to roundtrip through Photoshop is a huge bonus for me. I still need Photoshop, but will continue to use it only when needed to do the polishing work Lightroom and Aperture just can’t do at this point.

I played with a random batch of about 120 images in preparation for some focus groups with area High School Juniors and Seniors. I was amazed at how quickly I was able to find presets that really made my images come to life. Gavin’s presets were logically organized and labeled so it was really easy to experiment with lots of different treatments and effects. The feedback we are gathering from these focus groups will no doubt be shared in a future podcast. Surprisingly a few “trendy effects” aren’t resonating like I would have thought. My own nephew and his bride have expressed a strong preference for “a more traditional, film like look” and frankly don’t like the jacked up color, contrast and effects. Remember, it doesn’t matter what we like, it’s what the client likes that matters. I have found the following presets to be really great:

Dennis Zerwas (ProPhotoShow contributor) gave me a few Lightroom tips before I edited a January wedding (using LR3 Beta). I have been a long time Aperture user, so all this new fangled LR stuff got me really excited and the more I worked with it, the more I liked it! I had been using Lightroom for some of my images, and we use it for all our production work in the lab, we just hadn’t done much with presets before now.

On the last Podcast, the statement was made that pretty much every file that comes off today’s digital cameras looks dull. While I can’t imagine being able to tweak every file of everything I shoot (over 90,000 actuation’s on my main camera in 21 months) I will admit, there is some real truth to that statement. “Upon further review”, I looked back at a number of my images and it hit me; I haven’t let my clients see the finished product, until they pick up and pay for the order. Hmmm, what kind of first impression have my images been making in this digital era to my clients, their families and friends? You and I know how much we can pop the color, tweak the contrast, boost this, fix that… makes perfect sense to me. Are my customers able to have such vision? No chance.

Take a quick stroll through the images which show both a before and after examples of what I produced. The comparisons range from wow, to shocking, to maybe a bit too much, but bottom line, there is no question that that well executed post production is becoming a very important skill set to acquire in this brutal competitive marketplace.

One of my favorites was shot in U.P. Michigan of an old abandoned building. The cool old wood door and red bricks with the apron of snow was an amazing scene and looked great in the camera, but after a little Lightroom cooking, the scene just jumps off the page and will be hanging soon in my newly setup home office (shot in RAW, Canon G9).

In summary, I am more convinced than ever that any of us proclaiming to be “professionals” owe it to our clients and our own artistic stamp on the world to take the extra time to really make our images sing. If we don’t, we’ll all be out of business letting everyone else just snap away on automatic, delivering fine jpegs on a CD for fifty bucks to our past clients. In a day when “everyone is a photographer”, it takes a lot more than it used to if you want to rise above the competition. I may come from the “Old School”, but look out, I might just prove that you can teach an old dog a few new tricks.